Wireless phones, laptops, PDAs, base stations and other systems may wirelessly transmit and receive data. A single-in-single-out (SISO) system may have two single-antenna transceivers in which one predominantly transmits and the other predominantly receives. The transceivers may use multiple data rates depending on channel quality.
An MR×MT multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) wireless system uses multiple transmit antennas (MT) and multiple receive antennas (MR) to improve data rates and link quality. The MIMO system may achieve high data rates by using a transmission signaling scheme called “spatial multiplexing,” where a data bit stream is demultiplexed into parallel independent data streams. The independent data streams are sent on different transmit antennas to obtain an increase in data rate according to the number of transmit antennas used. Alternatively, the MIMO system may improve link quality by using a transmission signaling scheme called “transmit diversity,” where the same data stream (i.e., same signal) is sent on multiple transmit antennas after appropriate coding. The receiver receives multiple copies of the coded signal and processes the copies to obtain an estimate of the received data.
The number of independent data streams transmitted is referred to as the “multiplexing order” or spatial multiplexing rate (M). A spatial multiplexing rate of M=1 indicates pure diversity and a spatial multiplexing rate of M=min(MR, MT) (minimum number of receive or transmit antennas) indicates pure multiplexing.